October 30, 2011

Thanks Kubuntu and Canonical!

So several weeks back, the wonderful Kubuntu folks, on behalf of Canonical, supplied a tablet to help me test modifications I’ve been making to allow Bangarang to be more touch friendly. Bangarang was shipped with Plasma Active One with some very basic modifications to help make it at least tolerable on a touch device. I’ve spent a little more time trying to improve the touch mode and the supplied tablet has made it so much easier for testing.

I just committed some of these updates to master and I’m looking for feedback. Feel free to use the bug tracker or Google+ to share any feedback with me. You can use the comments here as well. Here are a couple current screenshots of Bangarang in touch mode (bangarang –touch):

A few of the updates for touch mode include flickable scrolling in the media lists, playist and Info View, disabled some mouse hover interaction mechanisms and redesigned others to work better in touch mode, adjusted more widget graphics, size and spacing to work better in touch mode, touching the video during playback shows or hides the playback controls and a few bugfixes. No, I’m not totally pre-occupied with these touch mode enhancements – I’d like to tackle some bugfixing over the next few weeks. Anyone interested in helping is welcome.🙂

I’m really grateful to the Kubuntu folks and Canonical for their generosity. I have much more touch mode work to do and, so far, having a tablet for development testing has made it much more efficient and fun.

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It’s nice to see activity on Bangarang one again. There are still few shortcomings in desktop version that would be nice to see fixed like proper keyboard handling (backward, foward ect) but other than that, awesome software.

Do you have any plans to port the Active interface to QML now that Phonon supports it?

Cool. Nice work. I’m hoping you wont stop this work. Plasma Active really needs a good media player. There are many usability improvements left for future versions. In the result the desktop version also benefits form this work

btw, there is one category in the media list view that isn’t included: “Never viewed”. this is pretty useful for watching things you haven’t yet watched .. i found myself missing this almost every single time i fired up bangarang on my tablet in the last month🙂

Thanks much for the feedback and thanks Elias for updating the issue tracker.

“Never watched/listened” has surprisingly been a little tricky since I struggle a little figuring out which never played items to show and in what order. When the number of never played items in the library is very large since the query can take while to run. I’d like to limit it by default to 20 or so items but not sure what criteria to use for ordering/limiting. Even random ordering can be tricky. Maybe look at a recently played category (genre, type, etc.) and order by that. Hmmm, now that Elias added “Never Played” to the “Recently Added” feature request, it might make sense to order never played by Recently Added. hmmm…